First night in Tainan

Trip Start Apr 26, 2008
1
8
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Trip End May 09, 2008

Flag of Taiwan  , Tainan,
Sunday, April 27, 2008

Melinda and I checked into our hotel about 9:30 pm. Our hotel is small, but modern in many ways. It has an elevator, though it doesn't fit more than 2 people if you have luggage. And, in order to access it from the lobby you must walk up about 9 steps. Melinda's room is on the 5th floor and mine is on the 3rd floor. I thought we were 2 floors apart until we got into the elevator and I noticed there wasn't a 4th floor. Evidently in Asian culture, the pronunciation of the number 4 is very close to the pronunciation of the word that means "death", so for superstitious reasons there generally aren't 4th floors to buildings. Much like we don't have 13th floors I guess.

Our rooms are spartan by western standards but more than adequate. The bathroom has an absolutely gorgeous porcelain bowl sink with hand painted flowers. Instead of a dresser there are open shelves and a wardrobe for hanging clothes. On the plus side, there is a small refrigerator, cable TV (with 1 English speaking channel-BBC News), and air conditioning. The only negative, I can only find 1 electrical outlet to plug stuff in and it is next to the desk.

When Dr Wu dropped us off he mentioned that he wanted us to go out later that night (!) after Shuying and Ted arrived at the hotel. They were due in around 11pm. After taking showers and "freshening up", Melinda and I decided to wander around to find an ATM and a snack. After a bit we did finally locate an ATM that would take a MasterCard. Navigating the ATM menu in Chinese was an adventure. Confucius Inn bedroom
Confucius Inn bedroom
 There was just enough broken English for us to figure out where to put in the PIN number and how much cash we wanted. Of course, after very little sleep, doing the conversion of $1US equals about $30TW was not easy. We eventually figured out that we needed to extract about $6000TW in order to get about $200 US, but the process was slow and painful.

Luckily, just down the block from our hotel is a 7-11 convenience store. I haven't seen a 7-11 store in the US in a very long time, but they are common here. They are smaller than the ones in the US, and don't sell gasoline, but on the plus side, they do have a slurpies! We were able to find sodas and snacks.

We returned to the hotel just in time to meet Shuying and Ted as they arrived. Dr Wu suggested that we go out for a late snack. Ok... It's now 11:15 pm and I'm not really sure I'm hungry, and I know that I am dead tired, but off I go. Dr Wu's enthusiasm is overwhelming. He is like the Energizer bunny. We went to the only late night "Western style" eatery in Tainan, but that actually meant that they had forks to eat eastern style food. I had "salad bar" which was a combination of fruit, vegetables, fish, breads, and desserts many of which looked very strange to me, but most of which were surprisingly tasty. This was also our first experience with an "eastern style" bathrooms. More about that later.

We finally returned to our hotel about 1:00 am to get some much needed sleep.
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